Of all the marketing technologies in 2015, marketing automation was amongst the most piloted solutions of the year. To date, there are two hundred and fifteen—and counting—marketing automation solutions that you can pick from. On average, 49% of all companies polled are currently using marketing automation, and a whopping 55% of business to business (B2B) companies are adopting the technology. B2B companies are taking advantage of the huge efficiency gains from marketing automation software, and so it’s why we’re seeing that more and more of these companies are integrating it with their existing CRM systems.

To appreciate the scale of internet users, take a look at comparing at global statistics—there are approximately 7.4 billion people in total human population, 3.4 billion of who are internet users, and 2.3 billion of who use social media.

Historical Look at the Rise of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software used to be expensive and demanded initial investments with a high upfront cost. The economics have since changed, and now the tools are highly accessible to the majority of businesses. Let’s look through the timeline of the evolution of the Internet and its applications:

1971—The first email was sent
1978—The first mass email was sent to 600 recipients
1991—The World Wide Web became publicly available
1992—Marketing Automation became available when Unica was founded. At the time, this proprietary software was not openly available online and only less than 1% of the world population was using internet
1996—On the 4th of July, Hotmail offered free email usage to all internet users. The message was sent out, “Happy Independence Day. In return, we are going to give you a great new way to get email. It’s called ‘Hotmail’. Be free from your internet service provider!”
1999—Marketing automation market booms after Eloqua is founded
2001-2006—Eloqua’s success attracts more players to the market; Infusionsoft, Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pardot, were among the companies born from this competitive era
2005—Cloud based software starts to come out
2010—Companies start to add social media tools into their software
2010-2011—The years of enormous acquisitions

With all the activities aggregated over the span of little over forty years, a lot of innovation and plenty of money was made. During 2010-2011 over $5.5 billion worth of acquisitions were made in the marketing automation industry, to be exact. That kind of money can be compared to 22,000 trips to space! Lucrative!

Is Marketing Automation the Right Fit for Your Business?

Let’s look at top performing companies to see if they can tell us something about why they use marketing automation. 77% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) at those top performing companies indicate that the most compelling reason that attracted them to implement marketing automation is the unmistakable bolster in revenue. How does marketing automation propel revenue up up and away?

Efficiency gains and time-saving—cuts through costs and frees up more time for innovative work

CRM integration—segmentation and targeting

Data collection—valuable insights from analyzed marketing data

Multichannel management—keeps track of all channels whilst offering a single customer view

Increased customer engagement—68% of marketers see a boost in engagement data

More timely communication—58% of marketers find timely communication to be a big benefit

Increased opportunities—58% of marketers have benefited from more opportunities after implementing automation software

If heads of marketing, businesses, and marketers alike are hailing about marketing automation, then it’s no wonder automation has become so popular among successful businesses. And if those numbers are not compelling enough, we’ve compiled another set of facts that prove marketing automation is amazing.

10 Facts About Marketing Automation

Searches for “Marketing Automation” are at an all time high according to Google

Gartner says that the rise of marketing technology has created a new C-suite role: The Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT)

Marketers have noted an incredible 760% revenue increase from the use of segmented campaigns

Marketing technology tools show an average ROI of a whopping 223.7%

91% of users believe that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing efforts

63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation, leaving their competitors in the dust of manual marketing

In 2015, 89% of marketing automation users found it to be worth the price

Marketing automation high performers have an average of 60% higher lead-to-sale conversion rating

78% of successful marketers say that marketing automation is most responsible for improving revenue contribution

67% of marketing automation users listed the technology as “very effective” to “effective”

Email Marketing

Since the beginning of Marketing Automation in the early 1990s, the concept has evolved from email automation all the way to include social media automation. The technology evolves with the times!

Some of the most useful features of email marketing software, according to marketers, are:

Analytics and reporting—52% of marketers polled find this feature to be most useful

Campaign management—46% of marketers polled find this feature useful

Lead nurturing—46% of marketers polled find this feature useful

The most commonly used features are:

Email marketing—89% of marketing automation users polled use this feature

Lead nurturing—84% of marketing automation users polled use this feature

There’s a reason why email marketing automation is such a popular feature. It’s a solution born out of an undeniable demand. In 2016 to date, there are 4.35 billion email accounts in existence. That number is predicted to grow 26% to 5.59 billion email accounts by 2019. The reason demand amongst marketers for email marketing is so high is because they’re seeing that email marketing has an incredible ROI of 3800%. This impressive feature drives more conversions than any other marketing channel! Unremarkably, 95% of all marketing automation users take advantage of email marketing because it would be like shooting their businesses in the foot by not using it.

Lead Generating & Nurturing

The second most commonly used feature is Lead Nurturing. Marketing automation results in a 53% increase in lead generation and sales conversions. With a good marketing automation strategy and clear objectives, marketing automation can significantly impact the success of your lead management.

More than efficiency gains made in lead management, there’s been substantial proof that automation software has not only increased leads but increased “qualified” leads, “qualified” being the operative word. B2B marketers say that “The primary benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better quality leads.” As another great side effect, marketing automation additionally decreases the number of ignored leads, or low-quality leads.

Social Media Marketing Automation

Being present and advertising on social media is important but time consuming. Making use of social media automation is plenty worthwhile, as the numbers indicate:

91% of retail brands manage two or more social media channels

1 million new active mobile social users are added every day, 12 each second

In 2015, social media networks advertising revenue amounted to $25 billion worldwide and is expected to grow to $41 billion in 2017

In 2015, Facebook made $17 billion in ad revenues

Facebook adds 500,000 new users to its platform a day, translating to 6 new profiles created per second

48.8% of brands are on Instagram. By 2017, this is predicted to rise to 70.7%

Compared to Facebook, Instagram has 10x higher engagement

Compared to Pinterest, Instagram has 54x higher engagement

Compared to Twitter, Instagram has 84x higher engagement

What Does the Future Hold for Marketing Automation?

For better or worse, by 2020, customers will be able to manage 85% of their relationships without talking to another human. Big vendors such as Hubspot and Salesforce dominate the market. However, there’s a big group of contesting smaller vendors now noticeably targeting the niche markets to gain an edge, offering tools for different social media platforms.

As automation software gets more sophisticated, the market will get more personalised, adding solutions for specific markets on the outliers of the mainstream. Big players with all-in-one-for-all solutions start losing their market share to a big group of smaller vendors. The cost of marketing automation tools will most likely drop to a point where they’re highly accessible to all businesses. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) makes marketing automation accessible and affordable. We can expect to see specific tools created for the latest trends like wearable device marketing or mobile commerce.